The decadence of college football’s facilities arms race boggles the mind.

Alabama’s practice palace is outfitted with mini-waterfalls that pour into a hydrotherapy pool. Clemson’s has a nine-hole miniature golf course. Oregon’s has an auditorium with seats covered in Ferrari leather.

And now, here comes Northwestern, once the laughingstock of Big Ten football, with a jock Taj Mahal whose $270 million price tag reportedly makes it the conference’s most expensive practice facility. You wonder what goes through the mind of kids struggling to pay off their student loans. Does it make sense to spend more than a quarter of a billion dollars on a facility that only a small fraction of the university’s students will enter on a typical day?

Whatever the answer, this much is clear: The new field house and athletics center, which was dedicated Wednesday, is a distinguished, sometimes-breathtaking, work of architecture. Its calling card is not shiny toys designed to lure recruits, but structural drama that takes full advantage of its spectacular lakefront site. Lithe arches support a futuristic dome that spans a vast indoor practice field. Towering glass walls reveal jaw-dropping views of Lake Michigan.

As Northwestern football coach Pat Fitzgerald told an interviewer last spring, “Why do you need waterfalls inside when you have waves outside?”

Designed by the Chicago office of Perkins+Will and located at the northeast corner of Northwestern’s Evanston campus, the completed structure houses the training facilities of seven sports besides football (women’s lacrosse, field hockey and cross-country, plus men’s and women’s soccer and swimming and diving). It should be nicknamed “The House that Pat and Pat Built.”

In 2011, with Michigan threatening to poach Fitzgerald, Northwestern committed to replace its aging football practice facility, inconveniently located a mile and a half northwest of campus. The other Pat — billionaire former Aon executive Patrick Ryan, whose name graces the stadium — pledged millions of dollars for a top-drawer new facility. Fitzgerald stayed.

Thus rose the new building, which is actually two interconnected structures: the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Fieldhouse, which contains the practice field and had a soft opening last spring, and the brand-new Mark and Kimbra Walter Athletics Center, home to an athletes’ dining hall, coaches’ offices and meeting rooms. Mark Walter is CEO of the Guggenheim Partners financial services firm and chairman of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Together the buildings form an L-shaped structure that interlocks with the L-shaped Henry Crown Sports Pavilion, a stolid recreation and athletics building that was partly demolished to make way for the new facility. The combined buildings have an enormous footprint, not unlike a small convention center. Buildings like these tend to be massive, monolithic and inward-turning — in short, deadening to everything around them. But in the skilled hands of Perkins+Will’s chief designer Ralph Johnson, who worked with design principal Bryan Schabel and senior project manager Chris Hale, the Ryan-Walter center is anything but a hulking eyesore.

Johnson, whose portfolio includes the international terminal at O’Hare and the Boeing headquarters along the Chicago River, has long excelled at turning out modernist buildings that sensitively respond to their sites, but introduce something fresh. He does it again here with materials (limestone, glass and aluminum) that relate well to surrounding campus structures. To break up the building’s mass, he employs tried-and-true elements of his visual language — among them, cantilevered window bays, stiltlike columns and facade wrappers that resemble Mobius strips.

The center may be futuristic, but, unlike the flying saucer addition to Soldier Field, it doesn’t look like it parachuted in from outer space.

The big event, the domed practice field, is something fresh in Johnson’s catalog, responding to the need for a ceiling that would be high enough for field goal kicks and punts yet low enough to adhere to Evanston’s height limit. Its rhythmic steel arches — set 30 feet apart, like the major yard lines of a football field — span an impressive 240 feet. To the north, a curtainlike wall of glass, 44 feet tall, hangs from the roof, opening stunning views of Lake Michigan and an adjoining public beach.

As Fitzgerald said, who needs waterfalls?

Besides “wow,” the words that come to mind are power and grace.

Even if you never set foot inside, the towering glass walls let you witness the structural drama from the outside.

The building responds equally well to its natural setting. Part of its second floor cantilevers beyond the rest of the facade, making way for a new stretch of lakefront trail that links to an existing campus trail. Pedestrians and cyclists already are using it. Tall, handsomely sculpted concrete walls protect the path and the building from the pounding of Lake Michigan. Seating is nicely integrated into the lower parts of the walls.

Besides the practice field, interior highlights include a tall, south-facing entry hall to the Walter Athletics Center, which is outfitted with a large video display panel and a monumental flight of stairs. The building also contains a two-story athletes’ dining hall with fabulous views and the offices of coaches and athletic director Jim Phillips, which overlook adjacent practice fields and the distant Chicago skyline. Throughout the clean-lined interior, adjoining spaces share natural light and views, enhancing the sense of expansiveness.

If there’s a weakness, it’s the profusion of long, narrow corridors. But they’re spiffed up with attractive graphics that use lots of Northwestern purple and spell out messages like “Win Our Bowl Game.”

For all its strengths, the facility is filled with contradictions.

While the carefully composed, metal-and-glass facades project an image of openness, the aforementioned southern entry is reserved for athletes, coaches, athletic administrators and recruits. (A public lobby is located at the field house’s northwest corner.) The practice field is intentionally placed on the second floor, not just to fit onto the tight site, but also to keep the field out of eyeshot of other teams’ spies.

And while the building is far more integrated with the campus than the remote Ryan Field practice facility, it forms a kind of parallel universe to the campus proper, with its athletes-only dining hall and study center. In the Crown pavilion, the running track and basketball courts, which were open to recreational users, had the prime lake views. In the new building, the courts are underground and the track is at ground-level. They have no windows, a shift that speaks volumes about who sits atop the campus hierarchy.

Northwestern administrators insist that the field house will be used for campuswide events like a dance marathon.

It also remains to be seen whether the center helps the university recruit better athletes and improve its on-field performance. But the building itself performs beautifully, despite the fraught issues it raises about the rising influence of major college sports.

I haven’t been to every noteworthy football facility in the country, but Pete Thamel of Yahoo Sports has. Last spring, after a preview of the field house, he wrote, “In terms of size, spectacle and spending, Northwestern has sprinted past the biggest names in the facilities arms race.”

The high quality and creativity on display in the completed field house and athletics center add weight to that judgment.